I’m working in a solution, that has many micro-services and some of them share the same DTOs. Let’s say I have a Product dto, that is assembled and processed through 6 micro-services and all of them has the same contract. In my mind an idea emerged:

Can I have a place to keep this contract and share across my projects?

And the other thoughts came to my mind:

It can be distributed as a NuGet package!

I’ll update it once and the rest is just using it.

It will always be correct, no more typos in contracts that lead to bugs.

And boy I was lucky not to do so.

After some time I had to extend my contract – that was fine. But while services where evolving over time, Product started to mean different things in those services. In one it was just Product, that represents everything, in others it was Product coming from that specific data source. There were CustomProduct, LeasingProduct and ExtendedProduct as well. And I’m not mentioning DigitalProduct, BonusProduct, DbProduct, ProductDto, etc.

The thing is that a group of services might use the same data, but it doesn’t mean that they are in the same domain.

What is wrong with sharing a contract between different domains?

• Classes and fields mean different things in a different domain. So the name Product for everything isn’t perfect. Maybe in some domain, more specific name will be more accurate
• Updating contract with non-breaking changes is fine, but introducing breaking change will always require supervision. When it’s a nuget package, it’s just easy to update package without thinking about consequences
• When we receive a contract and we do not need all of it, we can just specify fields we actually need. This way receiving and deserializing an object is a bit faster
• When extending a shared contract as NuGet package we immediately see in a receiver that something changed and we need to update it and do some work on our side, where normally we wouldn’t care to update contract, as long as we need it

When having a contract in a NuGet package can be beneficial? For example when we need exactly this contract to communicate with something. For example, a popular service can share it’s client and DTOs as a NuGet package to ease integration with it.

And what do you think? Is is a good thing, or a bad thing?